Friday, September 03, 2010

Gotcha of the Day: Linksys WRT54G2 causes ssh sessions to freeze

A few weeks ago, I finally got fed up with having my laptops randomly lose connectivity with the wireless router. I figured the best fix would be to replace my old, cheap, router with something more robust.

So I did - I purchased the well reviewed Linksys WRT54G2 Wireless-G Broadband Router. I figured 600 4+ star reviewers couldn't be wrong.

And for the most part, I'm happy with the router. Everything was working great until I started noticing some very annoying behavior: ssh sessions that were left unused froze up.

Luckily, I make heavy use of screen, so no real work was lost. But it sure was a hassle.

I poked around in the admin interface on the router, and didn't see anything I could configure to fix this (though, admittedly, I wasn't really sure what I was looking for - a stop ssh from freezing checkbox, perhaps?). So, off to Google I went.

Turns out, ssh freezing up is actually a pretty common issue. And luckily, the fix is painless. I just added:

 ServerAliveInterval=4 

to ~/.ssh/config and it appears like all is well again.

I've got a new router and working ssh connections - can one ask for anything more?

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